


The Heterodyne Boys and the First Adventure!

by tsukara



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Action/Adventure, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukara/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the Heterodyne Boys were famous? They were just a couple of kids wandering Europa, looking to become that famous. This is one of the very first adventures of Bill and Barry Heterodyne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heterodyne Boys and the First Adventure!

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for Yuletide 2008

And then, of course, Klaus fell into the tar-pit.

It wasn't a big deal at the time, all it took to fish him out was six chickens, a spool of wire and that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon dissipater Bill happened to have lying around. Only four hours, and the whole ordeal was done with.

They didn't know then it would become a running joke.

They were born Heterodynes and therefore always knew they'd be famous. Well, everyone else thought that they'd be infamous, except for their mother. But every story has its beginning. This is not that beginning. For that we'd have to go back to the old Heterodynes and Bill's and Barry's births and...well, the tar pit is just more exciting.

As it turned out, one could not just step out the doors of your castle and become a hero overnight, even if you were a Heterodyne in Mechanicsburg. Oh, sure, the people would follow them, but ask them to do anything that didn't involve copious amounts of mad science and mayhem and a rather lot of them lost interest rather quickly.

So the boys had gone off into the countryside, wild schemes in their heads, with Punch and Judy, the two constructs their mother had left to take care of them, at their side. Bill and Barry were sixteen and fourteen years old, Bill just having turned sixteen three days before leaving Mechanicsburg.

"Look, Barry," Bill said, by this point quite exasperated. "It's probably just a nice, normal abandoned library. Nothing to worry about!"

Barry gave his older brother a look that would rival any other skeptical teenager's, mad or not. "With a big sign, with giant letters and _red paint_ telling hapless adventurers and villagers to keep out?"

Villagers who probably never wandered out that far. Villagers with whom right this very moment Punch and Judy (well, Judy mainly, Punch looking grave or threatening as the situation called for) were trading with. Buying supplies. Veggies, that sort of thing.

As long as they could sneak away to be heroes, the boys didn't care.

Bill sighed, rolling his eyes. "Probably just condemned," he began.

Which, of course, was when the screams started. Coming from within the seemingly-long-abandoned library were the apparent screams of a woman in high distress. From the excited grins the boys shared, no one would have guessed they'd been arguing only seconds before.

The boards over the door were so rickety, covered in red paint or not, that the two rather scrawny (Barry less so, even then) boys had no trouble busting right through them with a few aimed body blows.

After picking themselves up from the ensuing and inevitable pile of splinters and dust, they raced off down the dark corridor. It was only after a few seconds of running that either one of them noticed something rather odd. "Hey Bill?"

They had slowed down a fair bit by this point. "Yeah Barry?" Bill answered absently without looking back at his brother. He was too busy trying to figure out how much further on they might have heard the scream.

"I think there's something missing."

And so there was, when they'd both slowed down enough to look. Namely, books. And shelves. And other such book-related things.

Bill shot his brother a bewildered look. "This place did say 'Library' on the front...right?"

"Yeah. Big Letters." He stretched his arms out, emphasizing the 'big'.

Bill was just about to point out the appalling lack of books in what claimed to be a library in such big letters, when another scream, even more obviously female at this distance. The boys, accordingly, took off again, rounding a corner at a run.

Rounding a corner and barrelling straight into someone, knowing them head over heel that ended in the three of them in a pile.

Three of them. Bill, Barry and...a girl?

"What are you idiots doing?!" came the harsh whisper from the girl as they all struggled to get untangled from each other. She was first on her feet, beating the dust from the front of her dress with quick, angry brushes.

Bill and Barry, in true comedy form, took a bit longer before righting themselves. Immediately after getting their balance back, they exchanged a short look. They'd practiced for a moment just like this--well, nearly like this.

They struck a pose. Hands on hips, chests out, big grins plastered over their faces.

The look the now slightly dishevelled looking blonde was giving them could be described as 'unimpressed' only if one were being very kind. They wilted under this gaze, until Barry's shoulders were a little slumped, and Bill was ruffling the hair at the back of his head in embarrassment. "We just, uh, heard someone scream. Came to rescue them."

One immaculately groomed eyebrow rose slowly into her hairline. "Do I look like I need rescuing?"

The boys stared at her. Apart from being knocked over by the two of them, she looked perfectly fine. Better than fine, in fact. Her dress, though practical, was not the sort suited for adventuring out in the words or abandoned libraries.

Obviously this place was not so much abandoned, nor a library, for that matter.

"Um," Barry began, but was cut off by an exasperated noise from the girl.

"Well I suppose if you're here." With this short statement, she turned on her heel and began to walk briskly down the corridor. The boys scrambled to catch up.

She kept a brisk pace, short heels clacking against the (quite sturdy for a supposedly condemned building) stone floors. Bill, once the brothers had caught up, picked up the pace just a bit more to give a merry wave at the girl. She did look to be about their age, now that he got a better look at her. "I'm Bill, by the way," he said brightly. "This here is my brother, Barry. We're the Heterodyne Boys!"

They boys, supposedly out of the earshot of Punch and Judy, had come up with the name last night. They thought it sounded suitably impressive and adventurous.

She did not seem impressed. "Lucrezia. No you may not call Lucy, Creta, or any variant thereof." Her voice was clear and left no room for nonsense.

Bill swallowed hard, just a little intimidated, though a thumbs-up and big grin from Barry helped him convince himself he was doing well. He was about to point out that they were heroes (in training) and say, did she happen to know where that screaming was coming from, when she shot him a grin. "You're heroes, aren't you?"

If it had been lighter, he might have caught that evil look in her eye that went right along with the grin. Instead, someone who recognized what they were, without having to tell them, and a girl no less had inflated their egos until they couldn't see past them. "Why yes we are ma'am. Mad science, damsels in distress, all that." He was trying to sound flippant. All he ended up sounding like was a little worried.

"Very nice," she replied, not a trace of sarcasm in her tone.

Suddenly, at the junction of two corridors, she stopped. Pointing down the corridor branching off to the left she told them, "You two go that way." And with that started walking off down the other hallway.

"Wait," Barry protested even as Bill took a step or two in the direction she'd indicated. He swung around to face her as she looked back at them. "Shouldn't we come with you?"

Lucrezia blinked. "Don't be silly, I'll be fine." She paused. "This is the way to the back door."

Ah, and exit. That made sense, for the damsel in distress to flee the scene unharmed. "Shouldn't one of us at least escort you?" Bill asked, always helpful.

Again, she waved this concern off. "Like I said, I'll be fine. There are far more helpless villagers who need rescuing down that way," she informed them.

"Right. Well then." Barry summed it up.

"See you later then?" Bill put in, rather hopefully.

Lucrezia merely gave a blank smile. "Perhaps." With that she took off down her corridor, boot heels clacking on the flagstones.

"So!" Barry clapped his brother on the back, still pretty pleased over that adventurers comment from Lucrezia. "Let's go rescue us some villagers!"

Bill seemed to snap out of some preoccupation with the now empty hallway the girl had disappeared down. "Right! Rescuing!"

As they took off down the hallway that had been pointed out to them, Barry decided to withhold comment about his brother's odd turn of behaviour until later.

Bill slowed down, halfway down the hallway. Barry frowned. "What is it?"

Stopping altogether, Bill shot his younger brother a look. "Do people typically leave cardboard boxes lying around in hallways?"

"Um," was Barry's only reply. For there was indeed, in the middle of the hallway, a rather large cardboard box.

A cardboard box which, as they watched, stood up and crept forward several feet, before dropping down again. It didn't seem to have noticed them yet. Barry shrugged when his brother threw him a questioning look. So Bill simply walked over and picked up the box by the top edge.

Underneath was...a person. Owlishly, the boy who'd been using the box as a form of stealth (or something) down the corridor, blinked around at them. Before giving a yelling and scrambling to the wall, upright, for some semblance of security.

Startled by his yell Bill yelled too, while Barry just jumped. Then the kid (he looked about their age) seemed to realize that they didn't really _look_ like the evil kind of mad-science-y-types and stopped yelling. Or rather, managed to put words into his noise. "Who the hell are you guys?!"

Once they recovered from the surprise of finding out the box wasn't mechanically driven, they jumped into their pose again--they hadn't practiced for nothing--after all, and introduced themselves, loudly, as "The Heterodyne Boys!"

The kid looked them over just as slowly as Lucrezia had before, before breaking out into a grin. "I'm Klaus, Klaus Wulfenbach!" He told them brightly. "You guys here to check out the missing villagers?"

Missing villagers, of course, made things all the more interesting. "Actually we were just here to check out the screaming," Barry informed him, just as enthusiastic as Klaus was.

Within minutes, on the short walk to the lab, the boys had all become fast friends. Bill interrupted a discussion on the wacky sorts of clanks they'd let you get away with as a student at prestigious TPU to shush them. Judging by the glowing green light emanating from the room up ahead, they had found the lab.

Peering around the doorway, Klaus and Bill on one side, Barry on the other, they observed the scene.

The green light came from a great glowing glass tube on the left side of the lab, casting its eerie light from whatever sinister opaque green liquid it contained. The cylinder seemed to be part of some large machine, with hulking metal parts on either side of the room, connected with large pipes. There was even a sinister bubbling black pit it connected to.

And there, huddled somewhere between the metal structure on the right and the back wall was an appropriate-cowering group of people, dressed simply enough. "The villagers," Barry pointed out to the other two.

Interrupting them, and calling their attention to it, someone gave what was unmistakably a very evil laugh indeed. This one sounded as if the person wielding it had _studied_ for a laugh of this calibre. Up on a small balcony over-looking the lab, stood the producer of this laugh.

"Dr. Mongfish!" Klaus exclaimed softly.

At exactly the same moment Bill exclaimed, "Lucrezia!"

For there she was, next to Dr. Mongfish, a look just as evil as his was, if perhaps a bit prettier.

"Shh!" Barry shushed them both. Because for Dr. Mongfish, an evil laugh was just a prologue to the main rant.

"...But you villagers will only be the test subjects for my marvellous monsters!" Dr. Mongfish cackled evilly again, more as punctuation to the sentence than any particular joke. "Soon (if they work right) I will unleash them upon the world and Europa will be mine!"

The part in parentheses, was verbally obvious by the clear stage-mutter they were said in. After all, what good was having a captive audience if they didn't hear what you said? Whether or not they listened was, of course, a different matter.

"Lucrezia!" The girl in question stood up a bit straighter, belied by the wicked smirk on her face. "Will you, dearest daughter," he added grandly, "do me the honour of PULLING THE SWITCH?"

There was no mistaking the Sparky madness in that last phrase, no matter the capitalization. Lucrezia swept down the staircase towards the obvious on switch down below. On the other side of the room from the villagers. The villagers, in fact, were mostly cowering in terror, this being the proper body position one should assume when faced with a spark gone mad. They were in a loose group, with what seemed to be a bubbling pit full of viscous black something at their backs, the pit being part of the machine by way of the obvious feed tube out of it.

Lucrezia's descent, while hasty, still left a lull of a few seconds. Plenty of time to talk. "Klaus!" Barry stage-whispered across the doorway to their new companion.

Klaus tore his gaze away from the drama before them. "Yeah?"

"You know this girl? As something other than Miss Mad Science," He asked, highly curious.

Bill looked around too. It was an answer he was also obviously interested in. Klaus frowned, bringing his already-quite-shaggy, even at his tender age, eyebrows together. "I think I met her once, when Dr. Mongfish visited the University. But-"

"YOU!" The shout cut him off.

Three heads whipped around to find the mad scientist, his evil-but-beautiful daughter and half a dozen more-confused-at-the-moment-than-terrified villagers staring at the three of them. This was not a time for posing. "Um," Bill began.

"Run!" Barry shouted at the other two. And promptly charged into the room.

Bill had little choice but to follow suit. Stop the machine, save the villagers, save the world. Yeah, okay, he could do that. Neither looked back to see if Klaus was following.

Bill made a beeline for the girl. Lucrezia, as soon as she saw them coming, did what any smart girl would do and flipped the very large on-switch, giving a triumphant grin at Bill. The two hulks of the main machine slowly ground into life at this, steam issuing from some of the more bizarre connections that just may have been defying the laws of physics, as usual with a spark-made machine.

There was a _bloop_ from the black pit, and the villagers shied away with a few gasps and one girly scream. Klaus had headed for the group, intending to get them out before too many things like explosions started happening, as he'd heard they tended to with adventures like this.

Barry had gone straight for the stairs, hoping to make it to Dr. Mongfish before he fled. "Barry," Bill shout stopped him.

It caught Klaus' attention too, and the villagers as well. Bill was backing away slowly from what seemed to be the output end of the machine.

It went 'gloop'.

Something came out, vaguely dinosaur shaped, black and just a bit blobby, on the conveyor belt that was now chunk-chunk-chunking along. Everyone was watching as it landed of the end of the belt, plopping to the floor.

For several long seconds nothing and no one moved except for the machinery. And then with a slow groan and rumble with the odd glop coming from the creature itself now, it rose slowing into even more of a dinosaur shape.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex, to be exact. Sort of. With fins. In a lumpy, melty kind of way. But, when it opened its mouth to let out a strange, mechanical gear-grinding roar, there was the definite shininess of teeth glinting in that wide, misshapen mouth.

Dr. Mongfish was the first to break the silence with his practiced evil laugh. "It works!" There was even a note of surprise in his voice. "Haha! Behold! From mere chemicals in common sludge I have created this, the precursor to my masterpiece!"

Had they been terribly concerned with what he was saying, Bill or Barry may have been slightly insulted that they were only the test run. As it was, the test run was scary enough.

The creature gave another roar and began to amble towards the villagers with a hungry look in its goop. Everyone else sprang into action, a renewed chorus of villagers' screams adding to the atmosphere. Klaus resumed his herding of said screaming villagers towards a convenient side-door. No one knew if it led out, but it didn't look like the creature could fit through a door that small.

Or, at least, he was trying. Most of them were too preoccupied with screaming to notice. "Quiet!" He finally yelled in a voice surprisingly large. Most heads were now turned in his direction. "This way!"

Barry, determined to provide a distraction, rummaged in his many-pocketed vest for some kind of weapon, tossing away each less-than-ideal option as he backed away, the gloopy giant coming after him at a slow, growl-y stalk, dripping as it went. "Transistors, diodes...Portable Tessla coil? Not enough power," he muttered to himself. "Automatic rat trap-and-spit? Too small and wouldn't want to eat it." This too went flying over his shoulder. "Ah ha!" He held a fist up triumphantly. "Lemur jerky!"

This clearly piqued the interest of the dinosaur. It expressed this interest with a lunge. Barry ran.

Bill had headed for the switch at an even faster pace now. He'd reached it and was about to pull it down when someone inserted themselves bodily between him and the switch. "Lucrezia!" His brow furrowed. "Please move!"

The machine was still rumbling along, and, from the corner of his eye, Bill swore he saw another bloop over in the tar pit. Lucrezia planted hands on hips and glared at him stubbornly. "Don't you have a single spark in you?"

Once most of the crowd of villagers began to follow Klaus, crowd mentality took over and the rest followed at a quick jog. He didn't go through the door with them, simply herding them through and shutting the metal behind them with a clang.

He sure hoped that wasn't a closet.

Barry was managing to keep ahead of the dinosaur. It was slowed due to the fact that some pieces kept falling off of it, though never enough to stop it, and the fact that its feet really liked to stick to the floor. Still rummaging in his vest for something more useful, Barry waved the long strip of dried meat in the air like a very stiff flag, leading the creature in a big circle around the room.

"Of course I do!" Bill insisted at Lucrezia. "I'm a Heterodyne," as if this proved something.

Lucrezia flung this off with a hand. "And you don't have their sense of curiosity." She flung this same hand to indicate the giant tar lizard. "Don't you want to see what it's capable of, what the next ones could be capable of?"

To his credit, he only hesitated a second. "Well, yeah, but not when it's gonna start off by eating my brother!"

When she turned to see how events were progressing with said brother and the creature, he took the opportunity to dive behind her and throw the switch downwards into the marked off position. "No!" Lucrezia shouted, but it was too late. The machine was already making an ominous whining noise as it slowed down to a sudden stop in the middle of a delicate process.

Lucrezia glared at him and opened her mouth to make another comment, when, from above, her father called her frantically. "The machine! It's ruined! We should tend to the other experiments back home, daughter."

Glaring one last time at Bill for stopping the experiment and wrecking the machine, Lucrezia turned on her heel and fled towards the stairs. Bill let her go. He had a feeling they'd see her again, even if all he could put that feeling down to now was blind hope.

Klaus had managed to get all of the villagers back and was jogging back. He made the unfortunate decision to watch Barry leading the creature on. And then he fell into the tar pit.

It was only a little, Bill assured him later. Only cooling tar up to his chest! Definitely not as bad as it could have been, they told him. It still took four hours, he'd shot back.

Barry saw him go down, leg at a time, and grinned widely. "Great idea, Klaus!" He shouted, the Sparky tones falling into his voice natural.

As Bill was backing away from the machine, listening to its various clunks, hisses and ominous glops, Barry began to lead the tar-dinosaur in a large arc towards the tar pit. Making the arc wider, of course, was to give Klaus time to get out, more or less. Once the creature had spotted Klaus, successfully struggling out of the mire and trying in vain to get any of it off of his clothes, it decided that, even tar-covered, Klaus made a much more interesting-looking morsel than any old jerky.

"Incoming!" Barry shouted merrily at Klaus, causing him to look up and dive (more or less, given the black, sticky stuff now everywhere) out of the way.

With a pro-longed sploosh caused by a creature made mainly of viscous liquid crashing into a pool of itself, the dinosaur began to sink into the pit. Obviously it was dissolving and spreading out as it went, the deformities getting more and more noticeable.

Finally, it was nothing more than a misshapen jaw and several swiftly dissolving teeth that were left. Barry let out a whoop. "We did it!"

"We should get out of here!" Bill informed them nervously. The machine was not only making funny noises, like something half-formed was trying to get out, but was now issuing thick black smoke as well.

Barry and Klaus stared for a moment at the ominously-shaking machine. "Right!" Barry agreed, his voice about half an octave higher now.

Bill and Barry ran. Klaus stopped them with a "Hey guys?" They turned. He seemed to be slightly stuck. "Little help?

After the first few steps, he told them, it wasn't too bad. Fortunately Klaus remembered the way he'd come in, directing them down the shortest path until, true to his word, they saw daylight ahead.

And not a moment too soon. Behind them, as they turned the last corner, they heard the ominous and quite unmistakable rumble of the machine exploding. Diving out into the sunlight, practically cemented together by the tar that had dribbled off of Klaus on their short journey., they were followed by a puff of dust-filled wind close at that backs, covering them with a fine powder of debris as they landed on the grass.

Barry was the first to give a whooping laugh, tired and tar-covered as he was. Slowly, Bill joined in, going from low chuckle to full on laugh. Klaus, after a few seconds of looking at them as if they were completely mad, rolled his eyes and gave a few chuckles. Sure, he was laughing at them more than anything, but with the mood they were in, it was okay.

When he looked up, Barry's laugh trailed off, before beginning suddenly again. "Punch! Judy! Glad you could make it!"

**Author's Note:**

> Whew, for a girl who doesn't usually write action, this was sure fun to do! I'd always wanted a chance to do GG fic and, well, my Yuletide prompt was too fun to pass up! I'm so thrilled my recipient liked it. Thank you for the chance to do so! Thanks to LJ:fae_of_the_rose for the super beta and LJ:weetpea_grubb for the quick references (truly, they both are magic).


End file.
